[Lexicog] Theoretical constructs vs. practical reference dictionaries

[Mike Maxwell]

Kenneth C. Hill wrote:
> Root dictionaries do work for really sophisticated individuals. A few
> years ago at the University of Michigan, I was shown by a PhD student
> from Libya how to use an Arabic dictionary. I was quite impressed,
> but now I wonder how Libyan Arabic speakers not at the PhD level
> handle a root dictionary of Arabic? (For those of you who know
> something about Arabic on this list: Don't just say Arabic speakers
> do or don't. Let's try to find out how good that approach really is.)

I asked this of two of our local Arabic experts.  Tim Buckwalter is our
(computational) lexicographer and morphological parser writer.  He says:

> A curious thing happened in the early 70's: Arab lexicographers
> started compiling alphabetically-arranged Arabic dictionaries (and
> very good ones too, like Rohi Baalbaki, 1990) while Western
> lexicographers stuck to the traditional root arrangement. The lookup
> process in alphabetically-arranged lexicons requires some knowledge
> of inflectional morphology (for finding the citation form of a verb,
> or the singular form of a broken plural), but the look-up process in
> root-based dictionaries demands additional knowledge of derivational
> morphology. The root-based system is clearly superior for language
> learners because it invites browsing among derivationally related
> entries, and it forces them to learn Arabic derivational morphology,
> which is one of the most rewarding aspects of Arabic to start with!

Remember that when he's coming from the perspective of a very strong second
language Arabic speaker.

Mohamed Maamouri has worked in literacy in the Arab world (e.g. with the
World Bank), and more recently in various aspects of computational
processing of Arabic.  He was more skeptical than Tim about the usefulness
of root based lexicons, and very "down" on their usefulness for native
speakers.  I asked him whether there were real ("scientific") studies on the
matter, and he was unaware of any.

In summary, I think these responses are in agreement with Kenneth's
reservations, although of course they don't constitute the sort of hard
evidence he's looking for.

    Mike Maxwell
    Linguistic Data Consortium
    maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu



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